Here's the harsh reality of the situation: you have to pay to play. But you have to be smart about it.
As I mentioned in the thread about the
Tamron contest, just about any national scale photo contest is going to be a rights grab. There are exceptions, but as a rule, any photo you submit to a contest, you're going to lose. Don't submit that one-of-a-kind, can never be duplicated photo of the Taj Mahal you took while on vacation. You find something local that you can shoot again. A company like Tamron isn't going to farm out your photos and try to re-license them like a stock agency would. They're going to use them in their own promos: "look what our lenses can do". Even that is unlikely, because the images may not have been taken with a Tamron lens at all. They're certainly not going to use 10-15,000 images. They have to have the rights to post winners on their website without facing licensing fees.
Contests of this scale have legal ramifications. Tamron (and others) are protecting themselves from backlash because they must post the winners and make it public. Without a rights grab, what's to stop one of the finalists from saying they want $10,000 for their photo?
Yes, photographers are getting screwed. But it's largely their own fault because they're lazy and stupid. Just being honest. It's a bull market right now because of the internet and digital, but the industry is evolving. Albeit slowly. Twitter and Facebook are valuable marketing and networking tools when used properly. The problem with crowdsourcing is, there's no entrance exam required and too many people are eager to promote themselves without doing their homework first. The rights grabbers lick their chops while the rest of us recoil.
